This move may give more clarity to CouchDB’s direction, especially since Damien Katz, who created the database, last year opted to converge his CouchOne version of CouchDB with Membase into a commercial database called Couchbase. That raised concerns among the CouchDB faithful. Katz said that while his team would build on existing CouchDB and Membase projects, they would also nix what didn’t work. He said his company could work faster than a “community-based project.”

Kocoloski acknowledged that this caused problems. “CouchBase has dropped compatibility with Apache CouchDB [and] the fact that both projects have [similar] names is an unfortunate source of confusion for users — they’re two rather different beasts at this point.”